“The Muslim Woman” as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road

This essay considers the recent production of texts in English that construct and rely on repeated and homogenized images of Muslim women, focusing on a translated text but arguing for its contextualization within the market of popular memoir. Taking the translation of Rajaa Alsanea’s Banat al-Riyadh into English as a case study, I argue that revisions made by press and author to my translation assimilated it to chick-lit generic conventions in the anglophone marketplace, muting the gender politics and situatedness of multiple kinds of Arabic that acted, in the original novel, as a critique of the Saudi system. Paratextual framing of the marketed book and translational choices emphasized the fiction as a writing of “experience,” bringing it closer to the memoir genre and linking it to a tradition of what I call Orientalist ethnographicism. These effects produce a work and author-figure both exotic and familiar.